Content tagged with: user experience

[1 May 2014 | Comments Off on Building Products People Want with Lean UX | ]

You are part of a modern development team delivering new features like clockwork. But are you sure you’re delivering the right features? Are you relying on up-front product research practices that don’t fit with your development process?

Other creative disciplines, such as film, have long used storyboarding during the design process to explore the space of possibilities for their users, and to guide the production of compelling user experience. With user interaction patterns becoming more complex as UI technology improves, storyboarding has now become an excellent tool for user interface design, even in typical business systems.

We are designers, and we know how important design is to the success of our projects. We’re also agile! We believe in making incremental changes based on user testing. But there are some parts of the process we’re just not very good at yet. It’s usually still hard to achieve dramatic, site-wide style changes in an incremental and agile way, and most of us still run into “redesign” projects eventually.

Studies in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), User Centered Design (UCD) and User Experience Design (UED) have found that accurate and frequent customer input is essential for a successful software product. Knowing who your customers are, what their environment is like, and what their needs are gives you the information required to plan and design a product.

Gathering requirements for software development is not always easy and IT guys will often complains that customers have difficulties to express what they want to achieve with a new development project. In this blog post, Lars Hoidahl discusses this topic and explains how examples and screen sketches can help to write better requirements.

Lean Startup uses customer feedback as a vital component for guiding the growth of startup businesses. Lean Startup teams run continuous cycles of customer interaction to test what they know and inform decision making processes. A central element of this approach is the hypothesis. A team of entrepreneurs, UX designers, and agile developers armed with a clear hypothesis, and a healthy portion of trust, has a unique opportunity for true cross-functional collaboration. Josh will talk about how teams can replace requirements with hypotheses, how this can be done in different …

Persuasion in design is about understanding users’ requirements and what influences their behavior, then using this information to create effective designs. From a business perspective, an effective user experience is one that influences users to behave in a way that meets the organization’s objectives. From the user perspective, it is not just usability that is important; it is the entire experience from their initial view, through conducting tasks or transactions, to future communication.

Agile methods are frequently associated with iterations, incremental development and adding thin slices of functionality at a time. There are mantras such as YAGNI and there has been progress in terms of how requirements are specified.